<h1 id="introduction"
>Introduction</h1
><h2 id="background"
>Background</h2
><p
>I'm Pamela Fox, and I've spent the last three years of my life supporting the developer community for the Google Maps API(s). I started when I was a Masters student back when we had only one API - the JavaScript API that still powers most maps on the web. Since then, we have added about 4 more APIs, each with slightly different audiences.�</p
><p
>In my role as API support engineer, I am basically the middleman (middle woman) between the API developers and the API engineering team, and I am tasked with making sure that API developers are successful. This means monitoring the forum for unaswered questions, reporting bugs to the team, collating the top feature requests, creating sample code, writing articles, authoring blog posts, presenting at conferences, training paying customers, and more. It's a fun role because it involves a lot of different skills, and it brings a wide range of technical and sociological challenges.�</p
><p
>In this role, I feel that I have learned alot about what it means to succesfully support a developer community, and I want to share those learnings. I am by no means an expert, and I expect to keep learning (and hopefully learn from people responding to this), but I hope that this information can still be of use.</p
><h2 id="audience"
>Audience</h2
><p
>At Google, I come from a team called Developer Relations, and many of my peers in this team have the same role as me, but for our other APIs. This information is most directly targeted at them. However, there are many other people that interact with the API developer community at some point during their day, and this information is still highly relevant to them - the API tech lead, product manager, engineering team, marketing team, technical writer, support team, etc.�</p
>